Government, Science and Technology

It is frequently said that Great Britain is suffering from a shortage of scientists and technologists and of the means for conducting research and development and, since the study of shortages is the main interest of the economist, I propose to examine the reasons usually given for making this statement and to speculate a little about how a community can satisfy itself that it is devoting sufficient of its efforts to scientific and technical matters. As I shall try to explain in a moment, the scale of scientific activities in the country is determined by a very puzzling combination of public and private views, public and private action and, in the last resort, the striking of a right balance will inevitably be a matter of judgement and of intuition. Those who take sides too strongly, therefore, are not likely to give good advice, and I fear that, in recent years, some of those who have taken a vigorous part in the campaign for ‘selling science to the Establishment’ have been prone, with the best intentions in the world, to muddle up good arguments with bad and, paradoxically enough, to push the claims of science against the humane studies by making questionable use of history, economics, statistics and even perhaps educational theory.